Richard Aldington

1892-1962

With Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (H.D. – whom he married in 1913) Richard Aldington was a founding poet of the Imagist movement: his poetry forms almost one third of the Imagists’ inaugural anthology Des Imagistes (1914). Between 1914 and 196 he was literary editor of The Egoist magazine. He joined the army in 1916 and was commissioned in the Royal Sussexes in 1917.

The time that Aldington spent in active duty during the First World War was to become perhaps the greatest single influence on his writing for the decades to follow. His first, and perhaps most well known novel, Death of a Hero, was described by Norman Gates as ‘one of the best novels about World War I and a savage satire of the society that RA felt was responsible for it.’ His most immediate literary response to the war was his collection of poetry Images of War, published in 1919. [Source www.imagists.org]